Last week, Uber’s President of Ridesharing, Jeff Jones, sent out an important update to Uber drivers across the country. Uber has professed that 2017 will be ‘the year of the driver’ and Jones was hired five months ago to spearhead those efforts.

According to Jones’ letter, he’s been spending time listening to drivers, answering customer support questions and helping drivers at Greenlight Hubs. When I first read the letter, my initial impression was ‘so what?’. I’ve heard this spiel from Uber before, and nothing Jones said in his letter is news to me or drivers in general. What was even more worrisome, though, was what he didn’t bring up in his letter.

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Harry here. For a lot of prospective drivers, signing up to drive with Uber can be a big step. And if you’re looking to do it full time, there’s even more pressure. So today, senior RSG contributor Christian Perea shares everything he would have done differently if he had a second chance to become a full time rideshare driver again.

In 2014, I quit my job to become a full-time driver for Lyft and Uber. Since then, I’ve spent 2 years fully immersed in the sharing economy, giving over 6,000 rides to passengers in my car across 3 different cities in California. Obviously, a lot has changed in 3 years of Uber driving, but it seems like there are still a lot of questions and confusion associated with “getting started” as a driver.

I never thought becoming a full-time ride-hail driver would be as easy as Uber or Lyft advertised. In fact, I knew it would require all of the tedious bits of running a small business, and I was pretty sure that rates were going down in the long run.

So although I figured it would be tough, I had also always wanted to run my own business. Even if it was small. I really love cars, driving, and meeting strangers so when you combine those three things, you can see why I was so willing to take the leap in 2014.

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When last week’s big study came out that said rideshare drivers were discriminating against passengers who are minorities, there were a lot of headlines about racist and sexist Uber drivers. But I’ve never met a single driver who told me that they discriminate based on a passenger’s gender, sexual orientation or even race. So I started wondering: where is the disconnect?

Now, it is possible all those “racist” drivers just don’t want to admit they’re racist, but I think there’s a lot more to it than that. In fact, Uber and Lyft’s own policies could be a major contributing factor to the discrimination found in the study by the Stanford and MIT researchers.

Harry here. Uber is constantly releasing new features and integrations on both the passenger and driver side of the app – some are more meaningful than others though. Today, senior RSG contributor Christian Perea takes a look at a new one called Trip Upgrade that has some interesting potential. Let us know in the comments whether you’re all for it or against it.

Over the last two weeks, Uber Trip Upgrade has been rolling out to select markets. This feature works by reassigning requests to drivers that are closer to the request that they originally accepted. The feature is part of Uber’s goal of doing everything they can to maximize efficiency in their dispatch system by minimizing wait times for passengers and drivers; aiming for the never-ending trip.

Whenever Uber launches a new feature like this, drivers are bound to be concerned with a lot of questions on how a new feature will affect their overall operations on the road. Drivers have good reason for this because a lot of these changes affect our profitability and the choices we make on the road.

The message that appears in your Uber Driver Partner app if you are in a market that had Uber Trip Upgrade.

Harry here. For a lot of new drivers, most of the focus is about figuring out the basics: pick-ups, drop-offs and not getting puked on. But once you start to get some experience under your belt, you notice a world of intricacies happening through the Uber driver app. Today, senior RSG contributor Christian Perea takes a look at all the tactics Uber is using to get drivers to act a certain way and explains whether drivers, Uber or both benefit most from these.

Gig economy platforms face a lot of trouble if they order workers to do specific tasks. It obscures the line between contractor and employee and puts the company at risk of having their workers classified as employees. So companies like Uber are forced to rely on a different set of tools to encourage specific driver behavior.

If you’re driving for one of these services, you should be aware of these strategies so you can act in your own interest.

This phenomenon is not unique to Uber, but I think they have done the most effective job at it. Uber has engineered their app to communicate with drivers in real-time to get the desired result from their workforce. The in-app communications provides a constant stream of pleasurable stimuli to get you to do targeted behavior. Even companies like Lyft have followed suit and implemented many of the same features below.

About

I'm Harry, the owner and founder of The Rideshare Guy Blog and Podcast. I used to be a full-time engineer but now I'm a rideshare blogger! I write about my experience driving for Uber, Lyft, and other services and my goal is to help drivers earn more money by working smarter, not harder. Read More…

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